So for a lot of live shows, I would wear them myself and walk around until I found the best–sounding place in the room and stand there and record. “It came with a mannequin which had defined ears, or you could take the mics off and wear them yourself. “Sennheiser made one, the MKE 2002,” he remembers. To fill his Canadian quota of punk bands, Moore began going to clubs and recording live performances using a Kunstkopf dummy head microphone. I built my own Dynaco amps when I was like 12, 13 years old. “I was doing a lot of Nagra and mic recordings of indigenous music,” he says. Not because I was wanting to be a recording engineer so much as I wanted to fill my 40 percent slot so that I could then play all the British imports.”Īt the time, Moore was at the university doing his masters degree in anthropology, which also involved him doing some recording. So as a matter of necessity, I started recording. There was very little punk music being recorded or commercially available, especially the Canadian stuff. “It was a great idea, and if it hadn’t happened, we wouldn’t have had a Canadian music industry. “Radio shows had to be around 40 percent Canadian content,” he recalls. The unusual circumstances surrounding the recording of The Trinity Session can be traced back to Peter J Moore’s days as a DJ specialising in punk and new wave on the CHRW–FM station of the University of Western Ontario in 1976. It’s the lonely girl in Alabama on the porch on a hot night and she’s just slowly getting the words out of her mouth.” Microphone Experiments For his part, Peter J Moore is in no doubt as to why their version of the classic song has stood the test of time. Since its initial release, Cowboy Junkies’ ‘Sweet Jane’ has gone on to appear on numerous film soundtracks, including Natural Born Killers, The Good Girl and Flight. The Trinity Session was to produce their best–known track, a beautifully drowsy cover of The Velvet Underground’s ‘Sweet Jane’ (based on the version recorded at Dallas club End Of Cole Avenue which appeared on 1969: The Velvet Underground Live rather than the faster rendition, missing the bridge, featured on 1970’s Loaded). Then as now, Cowboy Junkies are based around a family unit - singer Margo Timmins, guitarist Michael Timmins and drummer Peter Timmins, along with bassist Alan Anton. They wanted to get out of this MIDI and synths artificial thing.”

“The stars lined up and it just happened to be that we were the innovators. “So I think it was the pendulum swinging,” Moore says. This notion dovetailed with the ethos that the members of Cowboy Junkies shared about making more naturalistic recordings of their alternative–edged country. I put it on and I thought, ‘Oh my God, why did we go away from that? Why aren’t we still doing this?’ That right there, that’s when I really got into the single mic recording.” “I got a Billie Holiday record from the German masters which were kept in proper climate–controlled vaults. Moore remembers experiencing something of an epiphany when it came to the idea of developing his single mic technique.

I’m listening to these recordings from the ’50s with two or three mics and I’m going, ‘Man that’s real music.’” “I was angry that music had gotten into drum machines and MIDI,” he says. Today, the producer of The Trinity Session, Peter J Moore remembers that for him and the band, the album’s distinctively sparse, reverberating sound was a reaction against the MIDI–dominated musical styles of the ’80s. A slow–burning, atmospheric take on country music, at a time when most artists were relying heavily on programmed sounds, the Canadian four–piece’s second long–player was all the more remarkable given that it was recorded live at Toronto’s Church of the Holy Trinity around one microphone, namely a Calrec Soundfield. In 1987, swimming against the tide of MIDI–powered pop records, Cowboy Junkies went into a church to record an album into a single microphone in a single day.īack in 1988, with the release of an album, The Trinity Session, recorded almost entirely in a single day, Cowboy Junkies became arguably the first band to create the music sub–genre which would later become known as alt–country. Margo Timmins was positioned outside of the main circle, but is represented by the Klipsch Heresy monitor on the right–hand side. The musicians arranged around the single Calrec Soundfield mic.

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